


time's got a way to take more than it brings

by celaenos



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Fic Exchange, One Shot, Past Imperfect Future Unknown Exchange, Stranded In The Past, Time Loop - Character Loops Until They Learn That People Care About Them, Time Travel as Therapy, post part 3 of crisis on infinite earths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:48:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22181335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celaenos/pseuds/celaenos
Summary: Lena opens her mouth, sucks in a breath, and then tells Kara everything that she has ever wanted to say to her. It’s not quite a fight and it’s not quite a declaration of love, but it lands somewhere in between the two, when she manages to get all of the words out.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 61
Kudos: 397
Collections: Past Imperfect Future Unknown 2019





	time's got a way to take more than it brings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



> hello!!! i hope you enjoy this little time traveling/looping nonsense. this season's storyline is also killing me in the best way, and your prompts were really fun to try and work with. this is set somewhere in between part 3 and 4 of crisis on infinite earths.

The universe is exploding.

Lena falls over. Alex is too far away to grab her steady this time and the impact _hurts._ Her ears are ringing, people are screaming, and below them all… their Earth is vanishing before their eyes. Lena makes herself watch until the very last moment and then she closes her eyes, holding the memory of the planet in her mind. Something else shatters from behind her and the screaming still hasn’t stopped. If anything, it’s growing. Something throws Lena further off whack and her head collides with the ground, hard. When she closes her eyes, the screaming echoes inside her skull.

…

…

Lena wakes up to the smell of pancakes.

Her neck hurts and at first, she thinks it’s because she fell on the ship, but it’s stiff like she has slept on it wrong—spent too many days in a row hunched over a computer, bad posture coming back around to bite her in the ass. She sits up and rolls it, slowly and realizes that she recognizes the couch she’s apparently been sleeping on.

She’s in Kara’s apartment.

The smell of cinnamon and coffee and Kara humming softly to herself as she flips—an ungodly—number of pancakes is like an attack, as terrible and painful as watching her universe explode, and Lena promptly falls off the couch in shock.

“Hey, you’re up!” Kara calls out to her happily. “You okay? I told you that you should have taken my bed. I would have been fine on the couch. Lena?” her name is said quieter than the rest, unsure, suddenly.

Lena whips up and instantly regrets it, hands quickly coming up to massage her sore neck. “What the hell am I doing here?”

“Um,” Kara presses her lips together, looking confused. “Game Night went really late last night, and you were exhausted, so I said that you could crash here. But you refused to kick me out of my bed, even though you clearly should have,” Kara laughs and turns to flip some more of the pancakes like everything is perfectly normal. Like they didn’t have a screaming fight only a few days ago, like their planet didn’t just explode.

Lena notices her phone on top of the coffee table and bends to snatch it up. The date confirms the strange sinking feeling that’s begun forming in her gut at Kara’s explanation, because she remembers this day. Or rather, she remembers the night that Kara is talking about—and it was over a year ago. But Lena never stayed over; she was _exhausted,_ she almost hadn’t come to Game Night at all, but the adrenaline of competition had given her a boost of energy. It completely dropped off by the end of the night and Kara had offered up first her bed, then the couch, and Lena had denied both offers, stumbling out of the apartment building and dragging herself to her own.

She had heard a noise from the sky as she walked home and had noticed Supergirl, flying above her, about a block away from home. Something about it that night had warmed Lena, a little. They’d been fighting, but despite that, the first flash of a thought Lena had had was that somehow, Supergirl was making sure that she got home okay. It was a ridiculous thought and she had immediately dismissed it, but with hindsight, Kara probably _had_ been doing a nightly patrol near her apartment for that very reason.

_Fuck._

Kara drops a plate down onto the kitchen island with a flourish and then pulls out whipped cream. “Okay, these are gonna be the best pancakes of your life!” she declares happily.

Lena grabs her purse and runs out the door, Kara calling confusedly after her the whole time.

…

…

She goes directly to L-Corp, ignores all of the worried texts from Kara and goes straight down into her lab. It feels stupid, slightly insane, even—but things have felt slightly insane for going on a year at least, now—Lena spends the day researching time travel.

It’s not the first time she’s done this, she has files prepared to go back to—it had been a joke between her and Lex, once. _Who’ll figure out time travel first? Who will be the first to step into an alternate universe?_

Well, she’s got Lex beat, if nothing else. That’s something.

…

…

By the time that Kara has texted and called her a combined twenty-one times, it’s encroaching on nine p.m. and Lena hasn’t eaten a single thing all day, and that sore neck has only gotten more and more persistent. She can’t work it out. Lena shoves her laptop away and rolls her neck, wincing as it protests violently at the movement. She stands, slowly, shaking out her aching limbs and then stretches up onto her toes with her arms above her head a few times in a row, waking her body up.

She should go to the small fridge in her lab and get some food, instead, she grabs a single protein bar and some scotch.

She falls asleep on the couch, laptop on her legs, the crick in her neck only gaining power.

…

…

Lena wakes up to the smell of cinnamon and coffee.

Disoriented and sore, she rises slowly, confusion working its way through her addled brain. It’s when she hears Kara humming softly to herself, realizes that she’s on her couch, in her apartment, that she freezes up. The previous day comes rushing back to her and she snatches for her phone, her neck screaming at her in protest.

“Hey! You’re up! So, I made a million, do you want banana, blueberry, raspberry or chocolate chip? The banana ones have cinnamon in them.” Lena rotates her gaze up slowly and meets Kara’s grinning, oblivious one.

It’s the same day. Again.

As gracefully as the day before, Lena grabs her things and runs.

All of her work from yesterday is gone—files disappeared from her computer, search history deleted as if she’d never gone there and spent the day furiously hunched and starving at all.

Her neck hurts like she did, and that just feels like a cruel cherry on the top of a very shitty ice cream sundae. Lena goes to the coffeemaker and brews a pot while she mentally goes through what she had been researching yesterday; a dimension is anything that contains matter, space and time, and there might be multiple dimensions inside one reality, sort of in the way that there are different rooms in a house. An alternate _reality_ , on the other hand—

The coffee pot finishes and Lena grabs the largest mug that she owns, always left in the lab for this exact purpose. It’s a beast of a thing that fills nearly the entire pot—which is _intended_ to fill up ten separate cups. Lena ignores the third call from Kara and grabs a protein bar—the exact one that she ate yesterday. She pauses only a moment to consider how the contents got back out of her stomach, solidified, and found their way back into the plastic packaging and into her lab. She also is _deeply_ curious as to how she fell asleep on one couch and woke up miles away on another.

Lena knows that there are scientists who theorize that there could be infinite parallel universes. No one can agree on how they form or what causes them or even what the divergence points are—whether they’re conscious decisions or environmental factors or random chance. Lena just has to figure out what the factors were that led her from the deck of a spaceship, watching as her Earth dissipated, to sleeping on Kara’s couch, over a year ago.

Twice.

Maybe Lex has the equivalent of a Delorean hanging around here somewhere—part of her wouldn’t even be annoyed if he figured it out and kept it from her, right now.

Kara has recruited Alex into The Hunt for Lena now. Lena hits ignore on the call with just as much force as she has on all of Kara’s—they’re no more friends than she and Kara, anymore. Alex lied to her too. They all did. Not only did Alex lie, but she was also perfectly willing to blow Lena to pieces until Kara stopped her.

She leaves her phone where it is and goes to dig through Lex’s things. It takes hours and she comes up with a few things that _might_ be promising and scribbles her notes into a notebook instead of her laptop, just in case. If nothing else, she always used to remember things better when she took notes that way, as a student.

She falls asleep on what was supposed to be material for a bulletproof suit, down in the bowels of Lex’s lab—

And wakes up in Kara’s apartment, again.

…

…

It takes her four go-arounds for it to really settle in that this is going to keep happening. She never used to be that stupid, but, she keeps hoping that she won’t wake up again to Kara's soft humming and yet, every morning, she does. Her notes disappear and she has to start all over every day and it’s exhausting and irritating and she can’t help but wonder if somewhere, her planet really _did_ explode and she’s dead and this is her own personal hell.

She’s dejected enough that fourth morning to sit down at eat some of the pancakes. Kara is babbling away about Game Night, about the latest article she’s been researching, about dinner next week with Nia, and Lena only half listens and eats and wants to claw Kara’s eyes out of her skull with her fingernails. There’s too much empathy in Kara’s body and Lena suddenly can’t breathe. She makes a remark, a bit too cutting, for this oblivious Kara who is lying to her but doesn’t know that Lena knows it. Kara goes still, only for half of a second. If Lena hadn’t been watching for it she almost definitely never would have noticed. How many times has Kara done that and Lena just sat there, like an idiot. She tries not to clench her jaw as Kara fiddles with her glasses, an obvious tell, now that she’s looking at her like an enemy and not just… _Kara._

Lena is hit with a memory of Supergirl making that same movement once, only to quickly course correct when she realized that she didn’t have her glasses on. It might have even only happened a day or so ago, if the timing is right. It’s that thought that has Lena making a thinly veiled excuse and grabbing her things to leave.

Kara still looks worried as she all but runs out of the apartment and like the three days before, Lena promptly ignores her.

She forces herself to leave the lab and go home at six p.m. this time. She cooks herself dinner and drinks nearly half a bottle of scotch and passes out in her own bed, frustrated and tearful and restless. The thing that makes her the angriest—at the world, at Kara, at herself, mostly—is that Lena misses her. A part of her has wanted to go back to before a hundred times in the last few months, to be blissful and ignorant and still have Kara as the one person who—

Lena swallows thickly and rolls over. She hates Kara so much because she misses her. It’s grown into an ache so acute, so sharp beneath her breastbone that it's like being stranded in the middle of a street that you thought you knew, homesick for a place long after someone else has come along and demolished it and rebuilt it up that so that what used to be yours doesn't even exist anymore. Lena falls into a miserable sleep—

…

…

—and wakes up at Kara’s; she is staring at a person that she used to think that she knew better than anyone, but she doesn’t, not anymore. And the truth is, she never really knew her at all.

Lena doesn’t make excuses and leave, this time. She doesn’t sit pliably and eat her pancakes. The only time she’s felt… anything in the last few months was when she finally screamed at Kara in the Fortress of Solitude and it’s not out of her system just yet, it would seem.

Kara hums happily and offers Lena pancakes and Lena walks forward and slaps her across the face without a word. It hurts. Kara’s skin is hard, they don’t call her the _Girl of Steel_ for nothing. “I know that you’re Supergirl,” Lena says, far too calmly for the panicked, confused, and hurt way that Kara is looking over at her. It sounds strange on her tongue. Unpronounceable. Kara’s whole body shifts and Lena can see her making quick calculations in the half-second that it takes her to go on the defensive, to try for damage control. Lena doesn’t give her an ounce of time to speak.

 _I killed my brother for you,_ she screams at her best friend a second time, like someone has come along and ripped the words out of her throat; they sting. _For our friends. Do you have any idea what you’ve done?_

It doesn’t quite land in the way that it did the first time, but then, Lena was too full of rage, panicking and bursting out with everything that she couldn’t keep pretending anymore. This Kara has absolutely no idea what she is talking about, Lex is still in prison.

Lena’s emotions are always there, simmering underneath the surface. She tries, very hard, to never fully let the negative ones show—her own personal battle with herself (and her mother)—the fight she’ll never actually win. Everything that she feels, she feels _strongly_. Right now, she feels nothing but anger. Hurt. Betrayal.

 _Our planet exploded and I hate you and this is all your fault. How could you, how could you, why didn’t you tell me? Why won’t you leave me alone?_ The last few days (last few months) all come bubbling up again and Lena stands there in the middle of Kara’s sunny, warm apartment and shouts it at her sinking, sobbing, silent form. Or at least, that’s how it feels, when it comes out, all loud and angry, like the words are burning her throat. It shakes the space between them and Lena’s whole body is trembling.

There is a traumatized half-dead thing to the look on Kara’s face and Lena slumps down into a chair to put a few more inches between them. The two of them just stare back at each other, the air full of everything that Lena just dumped unceremoniously into Kara’s lap. It feels almost like the final moments after a thunderstorm, when everything is both still and wild. 

“Lena, I…” Kara swallows thickly and tries to make some sense out of everything Lena has just told her. Four minutes ago, she thought that Lena loved her, was her best friend, that nothing was wrong.

Lena closes her eyes, hating Kara and her brother with almost equal measure; Lex, for telling her, and Kara, for giving him anything to tell in the first place. She wants to skim over that night, calcify her shame into something blurry and manageable, like a rumor about a stranger. “Shut up,” she pleads.

Kara shifts into a coiled sort of stillness, ready to leap forth at a breath, at a glance, at a thought. The violence hidden underneath her skin was almost tangible in those moments, once Lena had learned to look for it.

She stands up and leaves. Doesn’t bother grabbing for her phone or her purse since she’s almost definitely just going to wake up in Kara’s godforsaken apartment in the morning anyway, all of this erased from Kara’s memory and etched permanently into Lena’s.

She doesn’t go to L-Corp at all this time. She doesn’t do a single bit of research, just goes straight to her apartment and flops into her bed and doesn’t get back up again. The notes that were written by her own hand disappeared just as the ones on her computer had. Each day is reset like it never happened at all, except Lena has to deal with it all over again; a warm sunny day in the middle of September that won’t leave her alone.

People leave her, though. Her mother. Her father, Lex. Andrea. Jack. Kara. Hell, even _Lillian._ People leave and they disappoint you, bit by bit and then all at once; Lena thinks that she needs to have that branded into every chamber of her heart, because she always, always forgets.

…

…

The tune that Kara is humming is one that Lena doesn’t know. It’s something upbeat, something that seems like it’s there in the grasp of her knowledge but just slightly to the left. She stays there, pretending to be asleep for a few moments and tries to work it out but comes up with nothing.

She’s come up with nothing to explain time travel. Nothing to explain pockets of universes where the same day replays itself over and over again. Nothing to figure out if she is dead and being tortured or not. And she can’t even figure out the stupid song that Kara is humming.

There’s a lotta can’ts in her life, right now. The thought crops into her head in Lex’s voice, along with the image of a wry grin and a teasing, _no can’ts allowed in this house, Ace._

Lena rolls off the couch with a sigh. She is so fucking tired of this day.

“Hey!” Kara is smiling as she turns around to greet her, same as always. There’s not a trace of their argument yesterday anywhere on her body, like it never even happened at all. “So, I went a little crazy and there’s blueberry and raspberry and banana cinnamon and plenty of coffee.” Lena sits down at the kitchen table, considering whether or not to have breakfast; she’s hungry, she suddenly realizes. Ravenous, even. But under the circumstances, it seems almost vulgar to do anything about it.

 _I know that you’re Supergirl,_ hovers on the tip of her tongue and she presses it down with a raspberry pancake.

 _I fucking hate you so much that I want to scream,_ gets pressed down with a swig of dark, strong, black coffee. Made just the way that Lena likes it.

 _You could have trusted me, why didn’t you trust me,_ almost comes up, but Kara squirts some whipped cream onto her finger. So, Lena occupies her mouth with that, instead.

 _Lex is dead. My favorite person in the whole world is dead and it’s all your fault,_ disappears with a stolen bite of Kara’s blueberry.

 _I miss you so much that my chest hurts all the time,_ almost comes out, because this day is going to be erased, anyway, but Lena shovels banana cinnamon pancakes into her mouth and chokes on them. Kara jumps up to rub her back and in the process, makes the situation far worse.

“Can you get in touch with Supergirl?” Lena asks, once she is fuller than she has been in years, probably. Kara goes a little stiff, surprised, until her shoulders loosen and she wraps her palms around her mug and tucks her knee up. Practiced casualness. Lena preys on Kara’s need to fix everything, to trust Lena, always, and she tells her the truth.

The truth, the partial truth, and nothing but.

_Please, Kara, I need you to get Supergirl. We need the DEO’s help. I know that you can contact her. I’ve been stuck in this day for something verging on a month, almost. Please, I’m so angry and so sad and the last thing that I remember was our planet dying. Please, help me._

She doesn’t say it in quite so many words, but enough of them that Kara goes tense and then rises and makes to grab her phone. Lena thinks that she is actually faking a phone call to keep up this pretense for a second before she hears Alex’s sharp rap on the other end of the line.

The DEO doesn’t… quite take her seriously. That new Co-Director is hovering about and making Alex look like she might snap at any moment and Lena sighs and realizes that without any of her actual research this isn’t going to work.

So, she plays a very long game.

It takes (maybe?) another solid month of waking up, eating breakfast with Kara and figuring out different ways to worm into the DEO and be unobtrusive enough to observe people’s days. If she ever gets out of this, and she is not, in fact, dead, then Lena is going to hate September 17th for the rest of her goddamn life. She stops counting the loops, it’s not helping. It does take her three tries for sure before Lena prattling off what is about to happen before it happens across the entire DEO gets them to _listen_ to her instead of lock her up.

Regardless, they aren’t coming up with much else beyond, Supergirl knows a group of people who have a time machine spaceship, and maybe they can help. Supergirl contacts them and says they’ll wait and see what a woman named Sara Lance says, but… the days always reset before she ever gets back to them.

And Lena is still stuck.

…

…

She has lost track of the days. Lost track of how many times now she has screamed at Kara, how many she’s brushed her off without a word, how many she’s fallen asleep, hunched over in her lab trying to figure a way out of this mess. She has no idea how many times she has been to the DEO, to J’onn’s office. To a bar.

The only thing that she hasn’t done, is act on the one thing that she pushed as far down as she could even imagine, the minute that Lex’s words settled over her bones.

The day will just restart anyway and Kara won’t remember. So it doesn’t matter.

Lena gets up from the couch, walks over towards Kara and kisses her. Kara jumps in surprise but doesn’t pull back even the slightest amount. In seconds, Lena has her groaning and sinking closer into her arms and Lena doesn’t waste any time. Fuck this day.

She rips off her clothes.

Kara’s eyes go wide and her cheeks have gone bright pink and she’s fumbling with her glasses, trying to slow things down and to talk about their feelings and what is happening. Lena doesn’t want to talk to Kara about her feelings. She doesn’t want to talk to Kara at all.

Grief and anger are both terrible reasons to go to bed with someone, probably, but, when Lena presses Kara roughly up against the inside of her bedroom door, catching the grunt she releases as a few wood splinters catch on the thin fabric of Kara’s sleep shirt, and Lena’s slim fingers claw to grip Kara’s hips, her lips leaving the ghosts of what would be—on a human being—marks up and down Kara’s neck, she starts to understand the appeal. It is less about her ire, less about her pain, maybe, than it is about an ousting of desire. It’s about Lena’s acknowledgment that they are two people probably destined forever to circle their way around each other’s lives, but only meant to meet once or twice before setting off on different paths, never to return.

Lena is rough with Kara, because while this might not really be about her grief or her rage, it’s still _there,_ hanging in the air between them; it has texture, a weight. Lena’s heartbreak is a physical thing, heavy and taking up space in the air between their bodies. Lena knows that Kara sees it, can practically feel it running down the back of her neck, because she keeps reaching for Lena with gentle fingers. She keeps giving her these looks like she’s trying to figure out what is going on, what it is that Lena’s not telling her.

Lena makes quick work of her mouth until Kara is looking at her in an entirely different manner.

Lena’s not retaining any of this at all, which of all the things she’s going to be forced to remember and everyone else forced to forget, is a shame. Because Kara is as lovely as Lena ever imagined she would be. Lena presses Kara down into the bed and ignores the way that time has gone all funny, at the way Kara is trying to both catch her eye and make love to her at the same time. Lena doesn’t want the word _love_ anywhere near what they are doing right now. Love has nothing to do with it. Anger, pain, betrayal, desire, something to pass the time, but not love. Lena knows that, despite the way that her brain has seemed to dislodge itself from her skull. Despite the fact that she barely seems to be able to pay enough attention to be certain. Kara hovers above her and kisses her way down Lena’s stomach and it’s impossible to think about anything in straight lines, really; every time she tries it just turns into syrup.

Kara brings the pancakes—reheated, with whipped cream and the aforementioned syrup—into the bedroom a few hours later. Lena shoves food into her mouth so Kara won’t try to start asking questions. Then, thankfully, Kara falls asleep.

The sun’s gone dim and Lena watches as it sets in silence, nothing but Kara’s gentle breathing filling up the room. She slung an arm over Lena’s middle in her sleep a few minutes ago and there is a smile on her face, even in her sleep. Lena hadn’t been able to look at her much today, because that elated—if somewhat confused—smile hadn’t gone off her face once since the moment that Lena kissed her.

She was confused, but happy. She’s still lying to Lena, but… it’s obvious, from every minute of this day—and the ones before it—that she _cares._

Lena doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse.

…

…

She runs out of the apartment the next day after she wakes up to humming and a crick in her neck, fully clothed again, back on the couch.

She can’t bring herself to face Kara and pretend that everything is fine yet again. She doesn’t think that she can just sit at her table and eat pancakes and pretend that she doesn’t know what Kara sounds like when she orgasms, either.

She’s lost track of the number of times she has looped, now, but she was counting up until around the two-month mark, and that was a while back, now. Lena walks down the sidewalk, munching on a breakfast sandwich she bought at the café near Kara’s and trying to contemplate the idea of living this single day until she dies.

Unless she’s dead already. That was one of her early theories, the only thing that kept her from having a complete breakdown at the thought was the idea that if _this_ is her hell, Lex must be living a horrible day over and over, probably one that involves something ridiculous where Superman punches him repeatedly, and that calmed her down a little. Now, she knows that she has surpassed panic and fallen into a shitty sort of acceptance. She has tried _everything_ apart from trying to kill Kara and the idea of that feels…

She never even _killed_ Kara in the Obsidian simulations. Only punched. Threw off a cliff, once. Nothing that would actually _harm_ her. Lena doesn’t want to go dig out a small stash of kryptonite and watch Kara crumple to the floor. She never really has and _now,_ what if that just meant that Lena wakes up alone day after day, still stuck?

It’s not an option.

…

…

Lena picks at her pancake. (One of the raspberry ones, this time, she’s been switching her choices up each morning). Beside her, Kara is chattering away about her latest article—Lena could have written the fucking thing for her twenty times over, at this point.

“Lena? You okay?”

Kara only ever deviates from their morning when Lena is the one to change up her behavior. If she just gets up from the couch, sits down and eats and then leaves, the conversation plays out the same every time. Even once she started trying to get her help in figuring out how to stop the looping. The conversations went about the same when they went to the DEO, too. It’s only when Lena stays longer at Kara’s that it shifts. Only if Lena prompts her to.

There was the day that Lena asked Kara if they could both just call in sick and sit around and watch old movies all day.

The day that Lena asked Kara to teach her how to bake, promising they could go into work later.

The day that Lena recreated their argument from the Fortress.

The day that Lena fucked her.

And today.

Lena opens her mouth, sucks in a breath, and then tells Kara everything that she has ever wanted to say to her. It’s not quite a fight and it’s not quite a declaration of love, but it lands somewhere in between the two, when she manages to get all of the words out.

She tells Kara how she realized that she had shifted somewhere along the way to ‘Best Friend’ to something more like the person Lena thought she could spend the rest of her life with, maybe. She tells her how she felt, learning from _Lex,_ of all people, that she was Supergirl. How it felt to be lied to by the one person she had trusted the most in the last few years. How it felt to stand there above her brother holding a gun and hear that she was _wrong,_ but know that she needed to still do it for herself maybe, anyway. She has relived this day and thought about this long enough and had this fight with Kara too many times not to finally say that not all of this is Kara’s fault. She swallows thickly and tells Kara that some of this is Lena’s own baggage and she’s been piling all of the blame squarely onto Kara’s shoulders because it was easier than confronting some of the reasons why this was her fault, too. She tells Kara that she is both angrier and more exhausted than she knows how to deal with, and she can’t keep on living this single day anymore, she is beginning to go fucking insane.

For her part, Kara must sense something and sits there silently and lets Lena just vomit all of this at her, crying softly and trying not to reach out or interject. It’s worse, somehow, that Kara just… understands that Lena needs to get this out and she has _no fucking idea what is going on._ Kara knows her, anyway.

It’s too much, so Lena shoves the pancakes away and walks out of the apartment, leaving Kara behind as she drives herself to the beach.

Lena thought when she moved to the west coast that she would spend a lot more time at the beach than she does. She loved the ocean as a girl, but she has only been here a handful of times in the last four years. Lena sits down in the sand and watches the waves go in and out until she’s verging on a meditative state.

Kara walks over and sits down beside her a few moments after that.

“Did you fly here?” Lena asks and she can see Kara nod out of the corner of her eye.

“Is our planet really gone?” Kara asks, in the smallest voice that Lena has ever heard. It’s only then—somehow—that she realizes that Kara has gone through this before. In a sense. Her heart aches for them both.

“I think so,” she croaks and Kara sucks in a watery breath and presses her lips together and is clearly trying very hard not to cry. “It’s the last thing that I remember. One of my theories about all of this is that perhaps we’re all dead, and this is my own personal hell.”

Kara releases a horrible, ragged, inhuman noise that makes Lena’s chest hurt. She immediately wants to take her words back but she doesn’t know how. 

“I’m sorry,” Kara says, a few minutes later. “I… I wanted to tell you so many times.”

“Yeah,” Lena tells her, “you’ve said.”

Kara does cry now. She reaches up and presses her palms into her eyes and shakes her head, trying to control herself. “Lena, I know that I’ve screwed up. And, I might not remember doing everything that you’ve said, but… I know that I should have told you a long time ago. It was selfish not to. I’m… I may have let you down and I may have fucked it all up, but, I need you to know that it wasn’t… I _always_ believed in you. I always — cared — about you. It wasn’t about a lack of trust.”

“Yeah,” Lena whispers, watching the sun set over the water. She didn’t realize that they’d been here so long, sitting in silence for hours together before they really started talking. “I think maybe, I knew that. Somewhere in there.”

Kara is quiet for a while and Lena takes her cue. They sit there and watch the people leave the beach, the sun fully set, and the stars begin to come out.

“Maybe if we fall asleep together, it will change. Have you tried that?” Kara asks, finally breaking the silence. Lena’s eyes go a little wide of their own volition, remembering the feel of Kara beneath her, arching up into her, and she is embarrassed to find herself blushing ever so slightly. Quickly, she makes a joke about trying that already and turns it into a very strange flirtation that has Kara blushing so hard that it cuts through the hurt, a little, and Lena turns her gaze out to the water.

“I _meant_ like, sleep out here,” Kara finally finds her voice enough to clarify.

“In the sand?” Lena asks, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the thought.

Kara shrugs and lies down without another word. After a minute, Lena does too, albeit far more reluctantly. What could it hurt, she has tried literally everything else, save killing Kara or herself. She has fought with Kara, had sex with Kara, spent the day with Kara, avoided Kara, all of it still leads her right back to Kara’s apartment. To this woman who has loved her and lied to her in equal measures for the last four years. But, she has never once stopped caring, and Lena lies down next to her, exhausted beyond measure.

“We’ll figure this out,” Kara promises and rolls her hand so that her palm is up between them in the sand. “I promise. I won’t give up on you.” 

“You never do,” Lena says, barely above a whisper as she takes the offered hand. She falls asleep just like that, in the cold, gritty sand, her hand clasped in Kara’s as the waves of the ocean and the knowledge that in the very least, she does still _have_ Kara finally lulling her to sleep.

…

…

When Lena wakes up the next morning, for the first time in _months,_ she is not in Kara’s apartment.

But the world is still on fire. 


End file.
